The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Hey there SEOmoz readers! This week we are talking about what I like to call "Smarter Internal Linking". Rand mentioned internal linking a few months ago before Penguin even hit, back when we were still calling it the "over-optimization penalty". A few months later, we can see the potential effects that Penguin has had and the factors causing them.

So how can we be smarter in our internal linking? How can we target our important pages so that they are able to rank well for competitive terms, yet not be in danger of being slapped by algorithm updates? This is exactly what we are talking about in this video, including a few pro-tips I've picked up doing SEO in the competitive travel industry, especially in regards to microsites and ccTLDs.

Enjoy, and I'd love your comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. My name is John Doherty. I'm from Distilled in New York City, out here in Seattle for about a week, for MozCon. I came out here a couple days early, and SEOmoz was happy enough to let me shoot a Whiteboard Friday for you.

This is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently. It's the topic of internal linking. Today, in a post-Penguin world, we need to be careful about how we're linking to the other pages on our websites, both internally and externally.

Internal linking is a factor in Penguin, from what we've seen. I've been digging around on a lot of travel sites recently for a client, and I realized that sites that are in competitive niches, such as travel - there are a bunch of others that you can think of that we all may or may not have worked in at some point - that use a lot of internal links, site-wide footers especially, point to here site-wide footers in order to drive targeted anchor text deep into their site.

The problem I've been noticing here is that when you have a set-up like this, this is a beautiful little webpage that I drew for you, with a little URL bar, and I guess this is Chrome because we've got the extensions there, maybe a map here. You've got some text, and you've got your different products through here. It's just going to be an e-commerce site, or it could be a travel site. Here are sidebar links. So this could be your categories, what have you. But then often here, in the footer, there are links that say, "Atlanta Hotels, London Hotels, New York Hotels," and they're on every single page of the website. If you have a site that has 200,000 product pages, you have 200,000 links saying this. One term, two-
word term, key term, pointing back to that page. Something is going to look a little bit suspicious, right?

What I've been seeing here, as I've been going through, doing some competitive analysis, is I look at their search visibility using a tool. I use a tool called Search Metrics Essentials. I look, and a lot of them, their traffic is going up. It's ticking up.

Get to the Venice update, which happened back end of March or the beginning of April, which basically prioritized local content. This especially affected the travel industry, so category pages weren't ranking quite as well. They were bumping up the most well-linked-to individual hotel pages, what have you. Traffic dropped for most of them. Almost every single travel site I've seen, traffic dropped. It happens. Google made an algorithm change.

Then they take tick along, and we get to the next algorithm update, Penguin. Every single site that I've seen that has site-wide links like this, boom, dropped. Most of them have recovered a little bit. They've started ticking back up, but almost every single one has dropped. The sites that didn't, that are not linked this way, might have seen a little bit of a dip, but by and large they were good.

So what's going on here? The only thing I can think of, when it comes to internal linking, that I can see on these sites was these site-wide footers. They're also doing this externally. A lot of these brands, especially, have microsites, individual hotel sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the main website. Same terms on every single page on those sites. Multiply this by four thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, once again, you have thousands upon thousands of links saying these terms. This is a problem.

Today I want to talk about smarter internal linking. How can we link to our important pages in a smarter way? I have a few points for you. How can we be smarter? This is the question we should ask ourselves. How can we be smarter about our internal linking?

Question number one: Go back to the user. What would the user expect to see? Google wants to reward a good user experience. They want people to be able to find what they want to find as quickly as possible. So I always start with the user. What is a person going to expect to see? Then, from an SEO perspective, I think, "Which pages are the most competitive?" You go and you do your keyword research, maybe use SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool. You look at the SERPs. You figure out which sites are ranking. You look at all the links that they have. Which ones are going to be the hardest to rank for? Especially if you're working in-house, you probably know what this. You probably think off the top of your head, "Oh yeah, I know this keyword." This one is going to take a lot more, not only external links, but also internal.

So which pages are the most competitive? You need to prioritize those, but not the way that I just showed you. The third point is think about your taxonomy. Think about the page types on your site. I've drawn out here a little site architecture for you, right? We start with our home page, and then this is another page type of ours, the category. Then we have the product, and then we have the product details. If we're keeping with the hotels example, it's going to be your home page, domain.com. Your category, domain.com/londonhotels, or language/londonhotels, what have you. Product, so this is going to be a hotel page. Product detail, this could be like amenities for the hotel or something like that. It's a subpage of your product page.

Obviously, these are going to be your most important pages. They're higher in your site architecture. They're going to be more useful to the users. These are going to be the ones Google wants to serve up for the competitive search terms. We link to as many of those as we can off the home page. If you have a thousand of them, how are you going to be able to do that? If you have hotels in every single city in the United States, there's no way you can link to all of them from your home page, nor would you want to. You're diluting your link equity basically irreparably.

Here's another category page. This guy's sad. He's like, "What's going on?
I'm getting no love at all." Then he's got product pages underneath there, who are also getting no love. I'm not going to link. First of all, this isn't going to be my most competitive term. This is probably going to be like second-tier competitiveness. I'm not going to link to this guy.

Let's say this is London, this is Atlanta, this is New York, this is Boston. I live in New York, and there's a New York-Boston feud going on, so we'll make Boston second-class. If you're from Boston, I apologize. I love you guys. But I don't want to link to the Boston page, necessarily, from the individual London product page. But it will make sense for me to link to Boston from New York, from Philadelphia, etc. It's the same thing. If this is Atlanta, and this is New York, I don't necessarily want to link to it. London and New York, I don't necessarily want to link to an individual New York hotel page, but I may want to link to the New York hotel page from Boston and vice versa. We're joining these two up. Or if I know I need to prioritize Boston a little bit, I'm just going to link to it from New York, because that has more link equity going to it, because it's more of a direct line from the home page.

Be thinking about some creative ways that you can do this, some creative ways that you can link between your different page types and your important pages.

Some that I've seen, that are working, especially in the travel industry right now, are sidebars. Once again, these are not site-wides. Most of them are doing it in the form of popular products, popular locations, trending locations, something like that. A lot of them I think that they update them semi-frequently. If I was doing it, I would update them semi-frequently. Keep the main ones. Keep London and Boston, etc. Keep your very competitive ones. But then you can switch them as other keywords become competitive. If you know people are going to New York for Christmas, you can switch that out, and you can prioritize that page for a while to get that ranking right before the Christmas holiday hits.

Here's a little pro tip for you, something that I've seen working. This isn't necessarily internal linking. It's like quasi-internal linking. Think about your ccTLDs. If your company is in the U.S. or in the U.K., in France, etc., think about how you can use the ccTLDs to link back to these pages from the relevant page on that ccTLD. So you've got domain.co.uk/londonhotels with UK English. Domain.com/londonhotels with U.S. English, think about how you can link from this page, from this London hotels page, back to this page. You're still driving the targeted links. You could do it through an image. I've seen some sites doing it with all of the countries down in the footer. On that UK page, if you mouse over the US, it says "London Hotels," pointing back. Super-smart way to do it. They don't do that site-wide, and so they're able to drive those targeted links back from a different domain. Those are going to be very valuable for them.

One last thing that I've mentioned briefly at the beginning here was beware of your microsites. Beware of your microsite site-wide links. If you have sitewides on your microsites, as well as on your main site, this is exactly the kind of thing that Google can easily figure out. They can see everything. They can see the code. They can see the way that it's structured. They can look at the Who Is information. Of course, we can do things to try to finagle and try to trick Google, but those are only going to last for the short term. So think about building for the long term. Microsite site-wides are not really working anymore, from what I've seen, so beware of these. Think about the taxonomies within these as well. You can still link. Think about these the same as you would think about your ccTLDs, linking to the relevant pages back on your main website.

Now I want to get a little bit bluebird for you. I want to think a little bit big. If I were Google, what would I do if I were Google? If you were Google, what would you be wanting to see? How would you want people to structure their sites? How would you want people to link? What kind of content would you want on there? How should people link between all of that? Google wants the best user experience. If I'm trying to serve the best user experience, I'm not necessarily going to have a travel guide on another page. If I have a London hotels page, why I'm not going to have a travel guide that I'm sending people all around? It's bad from a user experience. It's bad from a conversion experience, etc. I'm going want all of that right there.

If I were Google, I'd be looking to rank sites that are like a London hotels page that also has a travel guide on there. I saw one site doing this recently. I was like, "Light bulb brilliant." Put your travel guide there on the page. You get links saying London hotels travel guide, London hotels, hotel travel guide. You can also link to the travel guide internally so you're not just using London hotels to link to it. That's the kind of thing that I would want to be rewarding, if I were Google.

In summary, I hope this Whiteboard Friday has been helpful to you. I hope I've given you some things to think about when it comes to internal linking. Feel free to tweet at me, dohertyjf on Twitter. Email me, my email is on the Distilled website. Once again, I'm John Doherty from Distilled New York City. It's been a pleasure. Please leave your questions and comments down below. Thanks.

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Comments
125

What would you say about a "mega-footer" on Zappos with a lot of links over there?

I think it's not bad having a lot of links in footer, as long as it's a good user experience, meaning that those links are actually there for users to be used. In most cases that would be an exact replica of your top mega-menu on eCommerce websites for example.

The point on footer links for me is....Google analyses your page and decides what that page is about. Hopefully each page on your site has it's own subject (read keyword/keywords). A better word for that being each page has it's own relevance.

Google takes a look at your footer links - unless they appear relevant to most if not all of the pages they appear on, it smacks of an attempt to manipulate. Things like about, privacy or contact have a natural position in a footer so it will skip penalising you for having them. [insert competitive keyword here] on the other hand probably isn't relevant to every page, and therefore appears unnatural - so you're penalised for it.

I agree with you. It's the unnatural that becomes an issue. Google wants the best user experience, and wants to reward sites that do that.

Like I said in a comment above, be careful with the anchors you're using. If your site is about you being an SEO specialist, don't link to the homepage from your footer, or your main nav, using [SEO specialist]. Use Home, because that's what the user expects to see. Using SEO Specialist would make you look spammy, I think, and I think Google would agree.

When you say ' [insert competitive keyword here]' do you mean in the context of the anchors google expects to see, for example: 'about keyword' , 'contact keyword' etc or just putting a keyword anchor text on its own ?

In other words is merging a keyword with an expected anchor (contact, about etc) together a workaround/good idea or bad idea ?

I agree with you the big footer generates great user
experience and as rand also said this in blog 10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt
in 8th point. Google only gives penalty which use bad keywords into
the footer.

I think John want to say here if you have a global business. Then
you have to use only main category links into the footer. If anyone searching
for hotel in London then they will get New York City link in footer but not its
respective inner sub categories/cities direct link in footer. And
that’s true if user is searching in UK then no need to indicate more about US.

I think from a UX-perspective the quantity of internal links and where they are (or should be) positioned on the page varies greatly depending on the kind of site we're talking about.

If I'm looking for a hotel, I don't think it's necessarily a bad user experience to see a relatively long list of links to hotels in other locations somewhere else on the page. In fact, I experienced this the other day when I was looking to book a short break away somewhere. I didn't particularly mind where I was going so seeing the names of other cities/countries I hadn't thought about, along with links to the relevant pages, was actually quite useful.

On the other hand, the industry I work in (translation) is notorious for exact-match, spammy internal links literally littered all over the page which are 99% of the time irrelevant and don't represent a great user experience by any stretch of the imagination ("I bought Chinese translation because I do business with China, why would I want to translate this into Romanian too?!").

Lists of internal links on individual pages have to be relevant and actually offer something to the user, not just to the site in terms of SEO.

I think John's comments on creativity in this area are spot on. Make internal link lists and sidebars interesting, fresh, relevant and worth the click, and then you might be on to something.

But if they're not going to work, they're not going to work - don't force them!

If I'm looking for a hotel, I don't think it's necessarily a bad user
experience to see a relatively long list of links to hotels in other
locations somewhere else on the page. In fact, I experienced this the
other day when I was looking to book a short break away somewhere. I
didn't particularly mind where I was going so seeing the names of other
cities/countries I hadn't thought about, along with links to the
relevant pages, was actually quite useful.

I agree, but this is where the user experience becomes really important (and hopefully the search engine is -- or someday will be -- algorithmically rewarding what it deems to be good user experience): since you're on a page of hotels in some particular city, then a list of other cities where you may be interested in a hotel makes perfect sense. But the links in that list can simply be the city names, maybe with a heading above them indicating that these are links to pages of hotels in other cities.

So it's good for the user to see "London, Paris, Stockholm, Venice, Tokyo." What you don't need, and what indicates that someone hired an SEO to push anchor text, is "London Hotels, Paris Hotels, Stockholm Hotels, Venice Hotels, Tokyo Hotels." You already know the pages are about hotels in those cities, so you don't need to be reminded of that fact with every other word.

And with user experience in mind, I'm a little confused about the advice regarding cross-linking domains. If I'm in the UK, on the UK site, looking at a page of hotels in London, how is it useful for me to have a link to the US site's page of hotels in London? It's going to have more or less the same content, maybe written more for a US audience, but is that really helpful for me?

Or are you just talking about having the UK site's London hotels page link to the home page of the US site?

Regarding anchor text and keyword repetition, you're spot on. I was going to come on to this, but felt my comment was already way too long!

Absolutely no need to repeat, in this example, 'hotels' time after time - it just looks so archaic and way too SEO.

And anything that looks like SEO tends to be bad SEO. A useful sidebar of relevant links (like what we're describing here) should look like a useful menu created to make the user's life easier - it shouldn't look like something designed to manipulate the SERPs.

Great comment, and I agree with you. It's not a bad idea necessarily to have a lot of links in the sidebar on a page, but think about the relevancy of the links. If they don't fit with the content on your page, don't put them there! This is where the creativity comes in.

If it doesn't make sense to an end user then don't do it. I like how "SEO's" are now becoming marketers. Like you said, Think of the end user! If you are focusing on the user experience then in the end Google will find a way to rank your website even if their algorithm can't do it now!

Thanks for the comment, Jake. I totally agree that it's awesome that SEOs are becoming more well-rounded marketers. If you think of the end user, you have a greater chance of success in the SERPs because you will have engaged users and advocates.

That said, you don't gain these users without outreach. So while we are creating the best user experience onsite (which is an iterative process), we should also be doing outreach to users and potential new users, identifying the highly targeted and engaged groups online that are our ideal customers.

I think the fastest thing to do to test if you're being penalized because of site wide anchor text footers is to <nofollow> them. Who the heck turns to the footer for navigation anyway? Okay, maybe I look in the footer for an address or a contact link. But I recommend testing with a <nofollow> 1st before making those changes. At least you'll be able to pinpoint a problem fast.

You know what, I think we're going to see footer navigation become increasingly popular, along with other footer-based content too.

With web pages getting longer and longer these days, be it on pages such as this one with multiple comments, or on those super-lengthy how-to posts, infographic-based pages etc. it's sometimes just easier to navigate from the end of the page you're closest to.

When you think about mobile too, swiping up (down?) a million times on your screen is pretty tiring on the finger!

(P.S. - Yeah you could just click a 'scroll to top' link, but those are pretty old-fashioned and I'm not sure how often people use them..?)

Internal link is something what most of the people I encounter
do wrong… and when I look at other websites for link building the case is quite
similar!

Mostly people think that adding a link in the footer will
help them ranking well but this works the other way around and they actually
get negative dip when Google spot it.

I think the best way that I found to link internally is to
link your internal pages with in the content (should make sense) this way if a
user on the New York hotel information pages is planning to book hotel room in Boston
he will find the link with in the content and move to that targeted page he/she
is looking for.

I like the advice of keep an eye on your micro sites… as
most people dont!

I have analyzed few sites and found they are ranking very good in SERP for their targeted terms, the major factor i have found is their internal linking. One thing i have noticed that those sites use different related terms to link from different different pages of the website. Thanks for the post.

I have noticed a major trend of this as well, I don't have any travel clients however I do have some in the hotel industry that have multiple locations. What I am having to do from an on-site linking basis is very similar to what you explained you had to do for your travel industry clients. Some came to us after the Venice update just looking for someone to potentially do SEO but after Penguin came out they basically ran to us screaming for help!

The analytics chart you showed was eerily similar to what we saw. I would say that most of the problem was their internal linking and site wide linking. When we noticed these site wide footer texts with exact match anchor text to the keywords they were trying to rank for we immediately took action to get this replaced with a new footer that was more user friendly and less about trying to pass every ounce of link juice through exact match anchor text. We saw massive increase in rankings and search volume after making these changes.

After the internal changes we actually used the Open Site Explorer to find some other partner companies had site wide external links to our domain for exact match anchor text. We then rigged up some A/B testing and had those exact match anchor text links changed to brand name links. This also showed a significant increase in rankings and search volume.

I have not adjusted many client's microsites yet or their linking structure however that is a great point and I am curious to see what ROI would come from adjusting these as well!

After penguin update interlinking becomes very important as SEO we should choose best inter linking for perfect navigation of site, some times people may choose wrong links so this article may helpful for them improve their interlink structure. If we have strong website structure and have ethical links then no any update affect our site.

Really loved the pro tip. For sites who have international, the ccTLDs is a spot that definitely can be utilized further. A lot of these brands, especially, have microsites, individual hotel
sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the
main website. Same terms on every single page on those sites. Multiply
this by four thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, once again, you have
thousands upon thousands of links saying these terms. This is a
problem.

One question - for the footer links that we all know and love, do you have any recommendations on what to if they are a "necessary evil"? Unique anchor text? Unique groupings? Just curious if you can enlighten it further.

I assume you are talking about the primary nav being in the footer of the site? To be honest, I don't have a hard and fast answer for you. I'm working on a client who does this, and we're implementing a top navigation soon. Maybe I'll blog about the differences we see, if any, or if they don't happen at all.

I'd love to see a case study from someone out there if they've seen a difference. hint hint

How about a good ol' fashion primary html nav in the header with text links to main pages? Isn't that basically creating the same issue? i.e. tens or hundreds of thousands of keyword heavy anchor links to the same pages? Google obviously isn't penalizing for this, but it doesn't seem right that they'd favor one over the other.

"Microsite site-wides are not really working anymore, from what I've seen, so beware of these."

I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees that! I've never been a big fan of microsites and now, especially after Penguin, I feel like they aren't worth the risk at all. Unless you are willing to develop a full link building, content marketing and social media marketing campaign for your microsite chances are it isn't going to do much good for your main site.

Thanks for the comment, Nick! I see the value in microsites, or franchises for hotels or restaurants, but once again you have to think carefully about how you are linking. This is why I gave the ccTLD example. Do this for microsites as well, and you're ok.

With all the focus on incoming links it's good to see your white-board Friday on internal linking. Of course that means I have to spend a day or so just reviewing my travel client sites (and others) to see if based on your post and the comments which tweaks might be needed.

Enjoyed talking you last week and look forward to seeing you at #mozcon or #linklove soon.

It may apply to sitewide sidebar links, if they're looking manipulative. It wouldn't apply to the top navigation though, because a) I'm also taking into account microsites, and b) users expect there to be links in the top navigation.

This is a great post, thanks. Just to ask though, I have a client who has a left nav bar on all the pages that links to their product pages on the site. Their rankings have slipped and I am wondering if it is because of the left nav. On the top nav, they have their category pages, but the products are not just available under those category pages, but site wide. Any helpful tips woudl be appreciated

Champion whiteboard. I was working at an agency during the panda/penguin saga and footer links was the biggest hitter by far. Internal linking is important and always will be, it's one of the biggest things that we as on-line marketers can control and keep on top of.

Footer links basically take in two ways, one might to increase SEO perspective and other one is to increase user friendly. This about this zappo is a quite big site which has variety of products, so in case to provide easy access for user, it would be better to put bunch of footer links at there. As well as sites like zappo, it has big amount of categories. So there strategy would be correct. My main idea is to provide link from any where to increase user friendly ability, on the other hand that would be help for SEO. But inserting too much links full of too much keyword would be really harmful for your site.

How would you order the following on a category listing page for a hotel listing website. Example: London Hotels- Most popular London Hotels, Recently searched london hotels and newly added london hotels. From the business perspective, these 3 would be equally important (and loosely related as well). What would be the best placement for these 3 clusters?

post-penguin i had gone through so many posts that shows the recovery stuffs from penguin updates but probably this post caught my attention most as i am doing the same research on interlinking since almost a month and try to cover up the footer links may plays worst roll towards our dropping.. and you cleared it very well and helps so many of us to come out with the smart way...

i appreciate your work on this thus would love to give u +1, tweet n off-course a like.. :)

Good job, John. For me it would be interesting if you could further explain the best practices in internal linking of a multi-lingual project. I am not sure that picture links (say without alt-tags) are the only thing to do here. Maybe cover that in another whiteboard Friday?

Thanks for this, very helpful. Perhaps the way to think about it is to consider the internal links as a resource for visitors as much as the written content. It is too easy to think of them as just a way of pumping link juice around the site but this can clearly lead to blanket, impersonal link structures which end up looking like spam on the website and being an afterthought. Perhaps the ideal way would be to select a group of ideal internal links for each page which would give the user the best experience and present them in a widget which is integrated with the rest of the page contents. This would ideally be done during the initial build of the pages as it would clearly be time consuming to retrofit this to a large site. What do you think?

This is one of the best SeoMoz tutorials ever ...have a bout 300 pages on my site and the pages with links in the footer have been ranking terribly...gonna implement all this today and will report back with results...

Good information, and organized nicely. Question @dohertyjf, what's your view on site wide footers on smaller website, say under 100 pages or even smaller? Are they always bad or is there a threshold where they can start to trip the alarms?

John, that was very informative. Even from my experience dealing with trouble sites in post penquin era, sitewite links in the footer are no-no. After cleaning up sitewide links, I have personally seen trouble sites slowly picking up traffic in Google again. Having related or popular or recommended link in the sidebar seems like a logical way of proving useful content for users.

question... I'm a web designer, and if I add "website created by Bullet Websites" link at the bottom of all my clients pages (I've been told that this is not the best thing to do). would this have some negative effect? or is this just for the "hundreds of thousands" type of situation?

something so many people don't seem to get; if you have 20 links on your page, then those pages get 5 times more value as when you would have 100 links on that page, which is why many times just cutting away the clutter of unnecessary links is enough

yes, that's what I'm saying; if you have the type of footer links as talked about in the video; just cutting those away might already be enough, as the other links on your pages will then pass on more value and most likely those other links are there purposefully

Great WBF John
I have just inherited a site that has been hit by Penguin for low/ no quality content, unnatural linking and exact match anchor text as you describe.
The site was full of exact match links to the home page from badly spun articles, I've re-written the articles using knowledge and insight from guys who have been in the industry for 20 odd years and used non keyword links to further relevant and useful information. Traffic hasn't improved yet but by doing this we are now just outside the top 100 for the big keywords instead of outside the top 500 a month ago.
The moral of the story is definitely usability is the new SEO!!!

I've noticed my competitors using anchor texts in their own blogs as backlinks essentially, and thought they were doing it wrong and/or would get penalized by Google. Looks like I was slow on the memo.

Running the open site explorer, they have a more trusted and higher score than me on the internal links side. Doh!

What you are saying about footers applies just as much to sidebar links too, right? Because sidebar links tend to be sitewide. Yet they are genuinely helpful to the visitor. G is just trying to make things harder for users, sigh.

Thanks so much John. Impressed that you manged to pump this out during Mozcon. I feel a sitewide internal link reduction coming on. I'll try to be gentle but my problem with SEO is I am not that patient. Thanks to David O'Donnell for pointing me in the direction of your super helpful WBF.

Does this really only apply to very large sites in competitive sectors ? as opposed to smaller sites, say where a footers unlikely to be repeated a vast number of times (& the anchors are genuinely useful)

it's just that most smaller sites usually don't have too many footer links, the footer links themselves are not the problem, its the over-use of it, and larger sites will have done it more often than smaller sites

We're a online travel company with 3 main Africa travel websites each in their own niche - dev and SEO managed in-house.

We frequently debate internal link structures. Just recently we've decided to reduce the number of links in our footer and even in our primary nav. When we were honest with ourselves, we realised that many of the links were there to pass pagerank more directly to deep pages. And not for the users.

We're going to make some changes and measure the effects. If you'd like me to report back to you on our findings - let me know.

I'm definitely not saying "Don't use footer navigation at all". I'm saying be smart about it. I think it's a great user experience to link to main pages from your footer, or to have custom footers depending on which page you are on. That's a great experience. It's the sitewides with your exact anchors across a large site that can be a big problem.

In regards to the sitewide credit links, definitely not black-hat, but it could be unwise. I recommend to people who do this to use their brand names instead of something like [new york web design]. All those exact anchors could become a liability.

Site wide footers from one site to another are especially
tricky. Especially if a brand runs lots of other businesses that operate in separate
niches. We used to find a lot of companies would rank for “SEO agency” if they
had done SEO for a website, and then stuck a sitewide footerlink at the bottom
and that was always really frustrating. It’s good to see that tactic no longer
works, especially as no one wants to have a billboard advert for another
company stuck in their footer. It was always a bad practice so the fact it no
longer works is a relief and a positive step.

I design sites as well as working as an SEO Consultant, so many sites i've designed have "website design by andy kinsey" in the footer - with that link where it is shown. These are sites sometimes with hundreds of pages, though not usually. But the link is sitewide. Those websites don't have these huge footers usually, but rather say a twitter feed or email sign up - so it's not linking in a spammy way. But my question is....

Will my link "web design by..." harm the SEO of my website or that of the client in any way. I know it would if it was enmass within the same domain - but does a few hundred links count as spam?

Therefore should i remove the link or stick a no follow on there ... I don't want to harm any site with these links :)

Someone else may want to chime in with a better answer, but from what I gather, generally: branded links are okay in this case. If you were linking the competitive part, "web design", then your site may be at risk of being penalized.

Yep, agreed. I don't think the "web design from" part is going to hurt you at all. If it was [web design] by andy, with [web design] as the link and this was across a lot of your client sites, I'd get nervous.

It may be yourself you'd be harming. One thing the Penguin hit first was links like that. I think they were more in the context of Widgets, Wordpress plugins, ect, but that's still close. Hopefully someone will remember how to find that video that talks about it.

Good stuff John...despite the dig on Boston. I was expecting hear..."These are for big cities like Atlanta, New York, and London and this one is for hotels in Topeka, Kansas." Definitely didn't see Boston coming.

The only way to make it in the SEO world is to build an authority website that provides quality, original and relevant content to its users. Remember when people search the internet, they are looking for information, so you can win a lot of visits and favor from Search Engines by providing them with unique and quality content that is relevant to their search query.

I believe that true SEO is the ability to meet the needs of internet users by providing them with targeted content that is relevant to the search query they would have entered before landing on your site. This is why Keyword Research is the corner-stone of any SEO Campaign.

Great WBF, lots of food for thought. There is just one thing that I want
to clarify though - for large sites with a site-wide footer, you're
only talking about penalisation for the keyword terms contained in the
anchor text for these links, right? Otherwise, all the 'home' links et
al will be bad news as well, meaning that sites > 100 pages shouldn't
have a site-wide footer at all.

On a number of my smaller sites (under 100 pages) I use a site wide sidebar plugin that displays almost every page title on the site grouped by category I did this to make it easier for users to navigate the site. It never occurred to me that I would be penalized in the serps for this.

Not quite what I thought it was going to be when I first saw the title but interesting none the less. Which brings me to something I've begun to look into (and that I tweeted about a few days ago).

On one of the sites I look after there is a page, a relatively unimportant page (for the moment), that I was slowly working on on-page items only with. No backlinks at all from off-site and none from internal blogs etc. Slowly but surely the page was crawling up the rankings and got to mid-20s and that was fine - keep it there till we were ready to launch the service properly.

Then about late May - it took a big drop, to low page 4ish, now, it's off somewhere down the rankings I'm not going to bother spending the time looking. for just where; but waaaay down.

Using the -amazon.com trick (still not too sure if it's valid or not, but makes for an interesting conversation) the page is back to page 3 for the term. So, has the page been 'penguined'? If so, then this is an interesting development since the ONLY links to the page at that point were 'menu' links - one in the main menu and one in the footer menu. BUT, unfortunately, being CMS built links all the anchor-text is identical.

So, from a Penguin point of view 100% of links to the page were using EXACTLY the same achor text!

Now, I'm not saying it was Penguin and anchor text that was the problem; it could be something else completely. It could. But I am starting to add some new links (with little value) and with varying anchor text to see if once there is a reasonable variety of anchor text to the page it suddenly 're-appears'. (I'm using 'poor' links to try and avoid giving the page a 'boost' in value that would fix the problem anyway.)

If my test does lead to the idea of a 'penguin' effect then this could add all kinds of issues for many newer, mid-sized, sites and category pages on bigger sites (hmmm, did I not read something about Google devaluing category pages recently)!!

I'm also interested in this as I suspect I've seen ranking changes based on internal anchor text diversity.
Using wikipedia as an example they generally seem to use consistent internal anchor text a majority of the time and it clearly hasn't hurt them. One of the big things in Penguin was external anchor text diversity but any thoughts on the best practices for internal anchor text diversity?

Very interesting!! I have been testing this myself over the last 4-6 weeks and have certainly found a correlation between anchor text and ranking drops with both internal and external links.

I have a YouMoz post coming soon about it so I wont delve in to it too much but the results were certainly slightly surprising! In short, when the ratio of incoming links with exact keyword anchor text hit a certain level, rankings dropped (lots!) but when the ratio of natural anchor text links increased and exact keyword anchor text links decreased, rankings climbed. I got this same result over and over on around 50 keywords and over 5 websites - new and old.

What I'm still not getting is how Google views footer links? You've mentioned that websites using site wide footer links using the same anchor might be viewed as spammy by Google. Doesn't almost every website use footer links with constantly the same anchor text?

Footer links are not bad. Footers on every page with your money terms, spread across hundreds of pages, becomes a problem, especially when you get to microsites as well.

So don't link to your homepage with "SEO specialist" if that's your keyword. Use Home, because that is what the user would expect to see. I think that's the main takeaway - what does the user expect to see and what will add them value? Footers can be super useful especially on mobile devices.

Excellent post, John! I think internal linking has been a little overlooked lately in terms of the algorithm update, and the focus has been way too focused on external links. Definitely got the wheels turning over here from this post. Very timely and well done!

And thanks for the continual updates from MozCon! I've heard this year's conference has been unbelievable thus far.

John, new haircut ?Saw your blog headshot changed with the airplane one but it didn't show that you got "corporate" :)

As for the site wide footer links I've seen several with huge footers, with a large number of links per footer that are doing fine after penguin - it's also probably related with the niche and competition similar with Panda - not all got filtered out as Google still needs some results fro the first page :)

Here is a scenario I'm working with right now, with a small travel company that has 4 main properties/operations. We will be placing the logos of each property in the footer, simply to help show the user that these properties are all under the umbrella of the same company.

Using image links to link the brand together seems appropriate to me. By avoiding the use anchor text and keeping it brand focused, I believe that this would be an appropriate use of footer links. Do you think I'm on the right track with this?

Another good piece of content for explaining my customers why I have to include selected WP pro-themes in budget. As John remarks, decent themes provide out of the box a nice and smart way for sending linkjuice tip to toes. Long story short after this statement, I agree sitewide links have not the power they had, if sitewides are the new Usual Suspects then non related aggressive anchor texts at the footer collection of non relateds are Keizer Sozé. Deeplinking on behalf of alternative language sites is a must for international sites such like OTA's and others, good point on this WBF.Good job John (you looked much to your 2 o'clock, script reminders or a Google Gang aiming at you? ;-)Thank you!

Thanks John for sharing your thoughts on this topic. how do you manage if you have lot's brand or category product and you want user to find them in short time. do you link to main product or brand or category from home page then links each related brand from that page.

Internal linking is huge now for search engines! Site wide link with the exact same anchor text seemed to be greatly effected by penguin. I try to use a variety of anchor texts when building links to my sites!

I actually find that to be a very useful way to think when I'm making recommendations to clients. "What do they want to reward?" This way, you not only get the short-term wins, but you're also safe longterm.

It bothers me greatly that these days we blithely assume that what "I", "we", "Google", "Bing" or anyone else wants to see is naturally aligned with what the user expects to see.

The truth of the matter is that we designers and marketers TRAIN the user to expect certain things ALL THE TIME. We determine what they expect by presenting them with a particular style or format which is duplicated over and over by other sites.

Every day we presented with expert views on which designs, styles etc are outstanding, intuitive, helpful for the user, and I certainly don't disagree with people wanting to follow the path of those who may well have it figured out. The fact is though, that users now have certain expectations because they learn to operate within the environment provided (sadly, that does also include sites that are not
what I would call useful or attractive, but have long dominated the SERPs).

If users have been trained over time to interact with sites in a certain way (i.e. to look for those shortcuts to "city hotels" etc on a travel site, then what Google wants to see (and a webmaster's choice to remove them) may in fact be diametrically opposed to what the user expects. It may even worsen their user experience, because let's face it, the first person to do that on a travel site most likely did it precisely to make it easier for users to find what they were looking for!

In the end, making major changes to site navigation that works well for your users on the basis that Google wants to see something different is no less "crossing the line" than keyword stuffing or spamming exact match anchors.

If we don't think carefully about whether user expectation and Google expectation align for each specific site, we can easily find ourselves on yet another very slippery slope of Google's making.

The example of web design companies being penalized for using sitewide footer links to their own sites is a perfect example. These links have always been there to make it easy for an interested user who might want a web designer (or want to avoid one) to find out more about the company that built the site. It has never been unnatural to do that. In fact it should be entirely reasonable that the anchor text include the web design reference, since that is exactly what the link is about. Clear, concise, relevant, but now debased by other people's unnatural behavior.

It is fascinating to me that with the intelligence we see built into the algorithms, there is a complete lack of attention paid to the fact that the world is not filled with round pegs that fit naturally into the round holes a search engine chooses as its preference.

Been waiting all week for this one! Great WBF John - lots to think about. I liked your comments about "if I were Google". I think that's a great mindset for all SEO consultants to have when considering things like site architecture and user experience.

When you refer to "microsites" what specifically do you mean? When talking about them you mention: "
individual hotel sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the main website."

So are we talking about large subdomains? Or an internal small set of landing pages around a category?And when you say "linking back", linking back to where? A deep page, or a top level page? Just want a little clarity on what you view as "good" sitewide linking, and "bad" sitewide linking.

Great video John. If your hair was any shorter I would think it was Rand himself at the office!

All in all I agree with Dubs, that the "If I were Google" was a great tidbit at the end. Bottom line is at the end of the day the search engine will not be subscribing to your service/buying your product.

by the way; you need to have a sitemap; and a sitemap only counts as a sitemap as long it gets a link from each page and links back to each page!

i's incredible how much differencve it makes; again; each page on the site has to be in the sitemap (and no not the one in WMT - although you could use your sitemap.xml for it, but it has to be linked from each page on your site, and no dividing it in sub-pages (like Yaost does in his WP-plugin), that is NOT going to do the trick; even if you have 100.000 pages; all of them have to be in the sitemap!

hi All,I would like to make a blog on cervical. Can i make all
Categories on cervical at my home page for best user experience? Will it beneficial for SEO purpose? Can anyone provide my best answer for this?